Barack Obama arrived in the presidency promising to the SEIU that its agenda would be his agenda. He has made good on that in every way he can, but how is it actually working out for them?

Today, the US Supreme Court smacked the SEUI down for what amounted to theft of workers’ pay. The union was levying “special fees” on workers, even those who did not want to be union members but whom state laws compelled to join, and using the proceeds from those fees to fund political action. The workers disagreed with the politics the union pushed, but had no opt-out, so they sued. The Supreme Court sided with them, in a 7-2 ruling that will result in Big Labor losing one of its strategic money streams nationwide.

On June 5, Big Labor suffered a string of serious defeats. The highest profile of those was obviously in Wisconsin, where Big Labor funded a controversial recall of Gov. Scott Walker and a handful of state senators for enacting reforms to public union members’ lavish benefits. Those benefits are strangling state and local budgets. Where Walker’s reforms have been fully enacted, they have saved money for the local governments, saved public sector jobs and reduced taxpayers’ property taxes. That’s quite a nice trifecta, but Big Labor assaulted Walker and tried kicking him out of office. Big Labor lost, big, in the blue state that was the cradle of the labor movement.

On the same day in California, the cities of San Jose, San Diego and El Cajon passed public union benefit reforms, or started the process that will lead to such reforms. Again, voters in a blue state voted of their own free will to reject Big Labor’s message and restore some sanity to their local government budgets.

Prior to these votes, in February 2012, Indiana broke the Rust Belt by becoming the first state in that region to enact a state right-to-work law. As in Wisconsin, Big Labor pitched a public fit, and as in Wisconsin, it lost. Indiana’s law moves the nation closer to becoming majority right-to-work, with 24 states having right-to-work laws on the books and 26 remaining union states. Among other things, right-to-work does what it says it does, and makes union membership voluntary. When union membership becomes voluntary, it goes down. Wisconsin serves as powerful evidence, according to the Wall Street Journal:

Public-employee unions in Wisconsin have experienced a dramatic drop in membership—by more than half for the second-biggest union—since a law championed by Republican Gov. Scott Walker sharply curtailed their ability to bargain over wages and working conditions.

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Wisconsin membership in the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees—the state’s second-largest public-sector union after the National Education Association, which represents teachers—fell to 28,745 in February from 62,818 in March 2011, according to a person who has viewed Afscme’s figures. A spokesman for Afscme declined to comment.

Much of that decline came from Afscme Council 24, which represents Wisconsin state workers, whose membership plunged by two-thirds to 7,100 from 22,300 last year.

Just to drive the point him, this is Wisconsin.

Reforms have been happening more quietly outside the war in Wisconsin. In March of this year, Michigan’s legislature passed a bill prohibiting the teachers’ union from using schools to collect union dues. (Texas enacted a similar measure via a ruling back in 2010.) Going back a little over a calendar year to April 2011, Massachusetts (bluest of blue states) enacted public union pension reform. California’s and Massachusetts’ moves break the left’s spin that these union reforms are solely partisan measures: They are fiscal measures, and Walker’s victory plus today’s Supreme Court ruling make their spread to other states far more likely.

Big Labor may have made a colossal strategic blunder in identifying too closely with one party and the current president. That has made painting them as political operatives, which they are, far easier for critics. The string of defeats Big Labor has suffered leave it reeling and in a weaker position to muscle the Democrats or threaten Republicans.

Ironically, President Obama may go down in history as the president who presided over the death of Big Labor, which under his term has suffered a very very very bad, no good year.

Bryan Preston has been a leading conservative blogger and opinionator since founding his first blog in 2001. Bryan is a military veteran, worked for NASA, was a founding blogger and producer at Hot Air, was producer of the Laura Ingraham Show and, most recently before joining PJM, was Communications Director of the Republican Party of Texas.

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1.
Steve

Like the collapse of the USSR, the death of socialism (and big labor) in the west is likely to be sudden and unexpected.

Knox was much worse for the unions than you noted. Instead of simply invalidating the extortion based on the lack of opt-out, it repudiated the concept of opt-out and replaced it with opt-in. This is suddenly federal law, for the entire US of A, grounded on the First Amendment.

Ironically, one of the California propositions the SEIU used the extorted funds to defeat was one that would replace opt-out with opt-in…

Furthermore, it rejected the union’s extremely narrow definition of “political activity” and defined it at a more common-sense level. Apparently, PR for a given political view, even if not directed in favor of a given party or candidate, is now recognized as political. Which, of course, it is.

The Union, panicking, had tried to moot the case by refunding the extorted money. However, the Court specifically rejected this tactic, noting that the 1A issues were still open and had to be dealt with. The sense I get is that the Court was looking to attack this issue once-and-for-all, and did so with a gusto. To the extent that Sotomayor and Ginsburg, who concurred on the issue of not having had an opt-out, were appalled by the legislating the majority did, without the issues having been raised, on the issue of opt-in and the definition of political activity.

Tough! The Union set itself up as a target, and at least a five-member majority pounced. It may be a while before a union tries to legislate by using the lower court. I suspect some pending suits in Federal Court may now be withdrawn.

BTW, I suspect that in your title, you should use “No-Good.” But then, I am a big hyphenater.

Are you sure? I’ve only read summaries but my sense was there had to be an “opt in” for special assessments or changes in the dues, but objectors still had to specifically have to opt out of membership to become a fee payer.

OK, I finally found and read the whole decision. I’m pretty confident that the affirmative “opt-in” only applies to special assessments or changes in the dues subsequent to an annual Hudson notice. My reading says that the Court came as close as it could to simply sticking its finger in SEIU’s eye though and saying, “Don’t make us answer the opt-in – opt-out question on annual dues. Hopefully, somebody will force that question very soon – like NOW! We’ll see how SEIU likes the persuasion of power.

There is less to the USSC decision today than meets the eye. Since Hudson came down in ’86 it has been black letter law that public employees cannot be compelled to be members of and support the “social, fraternal, and political” activities of a union. It is legal, however, for public employees in the states that countenance full public employee bargaining and union shops to be compelled to pay a fee for actual collective bargaining activities by the union, which include negotiating and administering the agreement, limited lobbying and other political activities to secure legislative approval and funding of an agreement, and some other political activity that goes directly to the interests of the bargaining unit. Obviously, those political activities are subject to very broad interpretative licence but a union must have an adequate record keeping system to distinguish between those costs that are chargeable to all employees in the bargaining unit and those costs that are charged only to those who choose to become members. All should understand the powerful disadvantage at which those who choose not to be members and pay only the fee are placed: they have no vote on who represents them at the table or in grievance proceedings, they have no voice in the union’s demands at the table or in the ratification or rejection of a contract or amendments thereto. Many employees who otherwise would never join do indeed become members so that they can vote in union elections and in contract ratifications.

CA is unique in that the union shop is not a creature of contract in which the employer has a say in whether it is willing to have a union shop; it is totally up to the members of the bargaining unit and if a majority wants a union shop, all the members of the b/u are compelled to pay dues or fees and the employer is compelled to deduct those dues and fees from employees’ wages and transmit them to the union. In most other states, the union shop is a creature of contract and the union security provisions are coterminous with the contract. This is a powerful tool to bring a union to heel when the contract expires; no contract, no compelled dues, in some states no dues collection at all except from those dedicated enough to come to the union hall and pay directly. Of course, you can see why the CA unions prevailed on the union-owned Legislature to completely remove this employer bargaining tool and even in my state, one of the earlier states to adopt collective bargaining, 1972, once a union is the certified representative, the employer must accept a checkoff authorization whether or not there is a contract. Even with that union advantage however, we found that less than 30% of the employees in most bargaining units would actually pay dues unless it was compelled as a condition of employment. The fact is though, that with a very few exceptions all the union states are deeply and almost irredeemably Blue, so there really is no bargaining. When I was Alaska’s LR head, the guy in CA and I were the only Republican appointee heads of LR at the state level in the Country; the rest were either technocrats below the appointee level in some of the Purplish states or Democrat hacks who were co-conspirators with the unions in the true-Blue states. There is no way in Hell any of those Blue states are going to do anything to help a fee payer object and most of the agreements in the true-Blue states have draconian provisions controlling when an objector may object, the form of the objection, etc., and then the employee is on his own facing the combined might of the union using his own money against him to confront the union in arbitration or even in court to determine what portion of the dues are chargeable to an objecting fee payer. And where it is determined by arbitration, as in CA, the arbitrators well know that if they don’t see things the union’s way, they’ll never get selected again, so if the objecting employee doesn’t agree with what the arbitrator did, s/he is once again on his own to face the might of the union, again using his money, to take the arbitrator’s decision to court where the standard of review is “gross error.” In other words, the deck is stacked even though the employee has a strong body of rights.

With that kind of decline in membership and dues it’s a good thing the NEA is getting into the fee for training of students business. Isn’t that who you want teaching American values (their version and definitions)and character education and civic involvement to students?

I was in a construction union in NYC. Yes, they stole my money, and Janet Reno, of all people, convicted Gaspar Lupo, my union boss and gave me my money back. But I was making $15 an hour in 1 9 8 0. That was back when a man could support his family. Now as to the money stolen by Goldman Sachs and Bank of America and all that, there’s been not a peep from PJM that I’ve read or any other Conservative blog. It’s all about the big bad unions.

So at this point, it looks like the union I’m in CSEA, is scared. Now I’m a public employee and we’re scared. We should be. Apparently, you all do not want college educated, diligent professionals working in government.

You all want Wackenhut to replace the police and corrections officers. And you know what, you’ll get just what you pay for.

There are many problems with unions, for sure. But high wages attract competent workers. No one at PJM or any reader, including me, can find a way to attract qualified teachers, cops or any other government worker without paying them well.

I would love to hear about how it can be done. Who is going to take a government job with no pension and a bad pay scale? Do you want to have your fire fighters, cops and court personnel tired from working two jobs? I really am curious. What is the solution to getting good people without a guarantee of good pay?

I’ve seen what they pay teachers in Florida. I’ve talked to people who went to school in Florida. It’s Awesome! Okay someone tell me who is going to be working at DMV and setting up grand juries and making sure prisoners don’t escape in 30 years at the rate things are going. I await a response.

Oh, and calling me a commie is not a response. I’m a registered Conservative, life NRA

I am a government worker as well. I am one of those professionals you speak of. I do not get paid anywhere near the amount you get paid. I can say for absolute certain that I work harder and longer than you. To too it all off, We in the United States Armed Forces cannot by law join a union. You generate no income, are paid by the taxpayer and are guaranteed more time off than the average working Joe American. Suck it up sweetheart, your time at the benefits smorgasbord are coming to an end.

Half the guys I work with are Marines or other veterans. None of them talk with love of their time in the service except the Marines. How do you know what I get paid? What is the value of your housing? Have you seen the barracks the Coast Guard has on the beach on Fire Island? If they were private homes they would be 3 million each. Can I just hop on a military transport and go play golf anywhere or go to a cheap PX? Maybe your ride on the gravy train is over. Have you noticed the privateers and hired guns being used now?

It is just amazing to me that jealousy can motivate guys like you to be angry at me because I work in the court system. Will you feel justified when court clerks and court officers are poor? Will that be a good thing?

So you cannot unionize. Do you like not having time off? Do you think moral is helped by segregating the enlisted men and treating your fellow soldiers poorly? I wish you got more time off. Further, my father is a DAV. My father in law is a DAV and combat vet. I lost a classmate in Beirut in ’81. And you know what Reagan did? Nothing, nada. The big bad Ron made a speech. So you guys get killed and we pay corrupt clowns to kiss our ring. That’s nonsense. Your life is just a valuable as any other citizen’s. So you have it tough and therefore you want me to have it tough. Makes sense. And that is how the guys at the top win; divide and conquer. But you know that and you’re willing to play along because I guess it’s macho to hate unions; unions that built every damn ship and plane and tank that won WWII. Unions that forced the robber barons to give Americans a weekend.

Because our buildings are union built, hurricanes don’t knock ‘em over like they do down in the delta. When you grab guys and pay ‘em $10 an hour to put up a building, you get what you pay for; crap.

And I would like to know, you call yourself a professional. Did you attend an accredited college in civilian life of the military and graduate?

The fact is, you can hate me. I know you do. We in public unions all have targets on our backs because someday, when we’re old, we can retire. How terrible. The fact is, you should be able to also. Everyone should be given a pension and benefits. That’s not Communist. Communist is giving the same pension and benefits to everyone, stupid or smart, productive or not.

I know a lawyer who the Navy spent about 250,000 dollars training to run a nuclear reactor on a sub. Then they sent him to military law school. Then he was discharged. Now he’s a rich lawyer and we paid for all that. But do you hear us complaining? No. What’s with the sour grapes? Why can’t you military guys accept that you knew what you were getting into when you signed on? I mean, you did read the papers, right?

Everyone should have a union. It’s not liberal. It’s tough and mean and a way to survive and get your share of the booty. Right now the booty is going to a-holes like stock brokers and real estate moguls. Y’all should get out and get a union job.

I won’t call you a commie; you’re obviously too stupid to be a functional communist. What you are is a self-interested and self-aggrandizing public employee whose hooves are so far in the trough that only your curly little tail is sticking out. You’re dumb enough to believe all the propaganda from union leaders and Democrat hacks about the great value of teachers, cops, firement, COs, etc and how the failure to give them more of other people’s money will result in the loss of vital public services such as schools, and police and fire protection. Anyone with any government who tells you they are having to lay off employees in vital services for any reason other than lack of work is lying. If school enrollment drops or a city’s population declines, fewer teachers and other employees are required. There are quite a few Democrat/union cities where this is the case; businesses leave because of the taxes and corruption, people leave because of the taxes and corruption, the unions/Democrats increase the taxes and corruption as the result and before long, you have Detroit and other failed cities and are soon to have failed states, e.g., CA, MI, IL.

Unionized teachers have managed to over-credential and over price themselves in addition to being Marxist dupes. Consequently, nobody not working in it has any faith in the public school system and has no desire to pay ever higher taxes “for the children.” Frankly, teachers don’t do a damned thing “for the children” and all that post-graduate education while it doesn’t make them a better teacher or more valuable to the citizenry, it does enable them to advance in the column and step pay schemes most have and get themselves paid more. Few “teachers” are even worth the $30 – $50K starting wage on any objective analysis of their knowlege, skills, and abilities right out of school in one of the least demanding degree programs.

Cops, firemen, and COs in the union states normally make anywhere from $50K to $70K in basic wage with another $20K – $30K in benefit costs, and since they all share in the overtime spoils, an annual wage of $75 – $100K plus the benefit load and a 20-25 year retirement system goes to someone for whom them minimum qualification at initial hire are fog a mirror, pee in a bottle, and pass something of a background check; $100K is damned good money for somebody with a HS diploma or even a GED and who had ALL of their training post hire and at the employer’s expense. And don’t talk to me about cops/firemen/COs with college degrees; almost no system requires them for either hire or promotion and most got them after hire, at employer expense, and most union contracts have a provision for higher pay for having gotten an unneeded education at employer expense. College doesn’t make you a better cop, but it demonstrably makes you a more reliable Democrat.

I’m sorry you couldn’t become an a-hole stockbroker or some other occupation in which a willing buyer bought your service for whatever the market would bear. In the earliest days, unions worked that way: the mill owner needed the labor, the labor needed the mill, and they both had an interest in keeping the mill prosperous so that the owner could both make a profit and pay a competitive wage. If the owner failed to pay a competitive wage, the labor went somewhere that would. If the union demanded too much, the owner couldn’t make a profit and the mill failed. It was a relatively self-regulating system. Ironically, what in the main destroyed it was the WWII production schemes that you tout. The War Labor Board and the various war production agencies forced almost all war production to be done under union contracts with union shops and at astronomical wages. My father was 4-F because of a birth defect but found employment working on building Liberty ships in Savannah, Georgia during the war. We still have some of his pay stubs in which he was taking home often $100/wk. or more at a time when semi-skilled labor in The South rarely made even as much as $20-$25/week, and it wasn’t until the ’60s that general labor routinely made as much as wartime labor was paid. The excesses and in some instances corruption, communist sympathies, and outright disloyalty of unions during the war led directly to the Taft-Hartley Amendments, among which were the provisions which enabled states to prohibit compulsory unionization. The events since 1948 have graphically demonstrated that unions can only exist where they can both have compulsory membership and the coercive power of government to limit or eliminate competition, e.g. regulated utilities, aerospace, transportation, defense, and public construction. Of course, in public construction you get a twofer; union working conditions where if you have one guy working with a shovel, he has a helper, and since you have two guys, you have to have a leadman, so it takes three guys to have one shovel working very slowly and if you need two shovels, you get six guys and since you have six guys you now need a non-working foreman – and you get all that inefficiency at the astronomical wages required by the Davis-Bacon Act and its state law analogs. In essence there are no private sector unions anymore. Those remaining unions that represent employees of ostensibly private companies are really in the so-called “Third Sector” in which the company either relies on public funding, rigorous permitting, or is a regulated monopoly. And yet, even with the excesses in the Third Sector, these workforces are relatively efficient compared to the unionized public sector.

Unionized employees in Democrat-run states are simply a cancer on the body politic; the employees don’t work and the supervisors and managers wouldn’t dare ask them to. In the union states that are still in play, all three or four of them at a given time, every election sees a union/Democrat hit list of supervisors and managers that have had the audacity to expect employees to work and the government to serve the people and if the Democrat wins, those people are out, merit system be damned. Merit systems only apply to Republicans, who are forced to follow union contracts and merit system statutes. Democrats routinely ignore the contracts and the rules and laws and nobody, including those unions you tout, says a word about it. If you get crossthreaded with a Democrat administration, the union won’t lift a finger on your behalf. The last time we had a return to legitimate government after a few years of union/Democrat misrule and corruption, we went and sought out some of the people that had been sold down the river in the prior administration and offered them re-employment.

In short, you and people like you are deluded. Few public jobs have any special qualifications and almost all of even the higher level jobs allow you to work your way up and advance with employer paid training. The only exception is those jobs with some sort of formal credential requirment such as engineers, lawyers, some accountants – only some, most government accountants started as clerks and worked their way up – some other fields where a legislature has been convinced that they ought to impose barriers to entry in the form of some sort of licensure, though often governments exempt themselves from the licensure while forcing it on other employers.

The fact that in the union states public employees have both unlimited collective bargaining rights and unlimited political rights essentially turns public employee unions into socialist workers parties. If the unions’ demands aren’t met by the governor or mayor, the unions go out and buy a new governor or mayor who will give them what they want. Even where you have a relatively responsible city council or state legislature that won’t open the taxpayers wallets to the unions, a Democrat/union executive branch gives them all sorts of goodies to keep the dues money coming in such as fiduciarily unsound retirement schemes, extravant leave packages, unaffordable severance conditions, etc. Quite literally, most governments couldn’t afford to lay off any significant number of employees because the leave, severance, and benefit payoffs would bankrupt the government. Any significant layoff would cause most unionized governments to have to shut down entirely because there wouldn’t be enough money to operate; that is the situation responsible public managers, something there aren’t many of in Democrat/union states, any time there is a decline in revenue. So, enjoy your sleighride to Hell. You’re enjoying the bounty of other people’s money and the Country is about out of other peoples money and it is going to be one Helluva hard landing for fools like you.

You don’t make a good living, do you? It is frustrating, I imagine. FYI, my state has a bicameral legislature. The Republicans in the senate are not RINOs. They’re actual conservatives. The Democrats in the assembly are actual Communists. I for one am a registered Conservative, proud union member, life NRA member. And no, I don’t sit around all day and no it was not a piss in a bottle and fog a mirror exam.

And my lovely wife is a registered Republican, NRA member and union teacher. And yes, we live well. And my state’s pension fund has been returning solid dividends essentially forever. You can look it up yourself if you’re not to dyspeptic.

You made many, many unfounded, clearly emotional claims and appeals. That’s nice but like I said in my initial comment, you get what you pay for. And the issue is not UNIONS. The issue I raised was:

How do you attract top people without paying top dollar? You have not even tried to address that. You have attacked legitimate and illegitimate aspects of unionism. And that means despite the length of your retort, you have not even engaged in a discussion of the question I asked.

So one last time, putting aside unions or political parties or corruption or any other ancillary issue: How do you get good people without paying them?

And if you can answer that, please explain how to get money out of a payer or a boss without some coercion? I would love to know because we’d both be happy, and as fellow Americans, we shouldn’t be angry with each other all the time and fighting verbally. Not that there’s anything wrong with besting an opponent in writing but I still think that if you have the answer to my question, for which I would be grateful, we could all work toward making America better. You do want that, right?

You claim to be some sort of conservative but your arguments, or lack thereof, are right out of the lefty playbook; you assume envy and assume an intellectual, or at least credential, or economic inferiority on the part of your opponent. I made a very good living when I still worked fulltime. I still make quite a decent living in retirement with my retirement income and whatever consulting work I’m interested enough to do. In my time in government, I’m reasonably confident I was much further up the food chain than you – Google is your friend and I’m easy to find.

First, I’m not going to grant your premise that top people are needed in delivery of service jobs in government; like any mass endeavor, predictable mediocrity and reliable adherence to procedures and standards will do just fine. “Best” is for the world of willing buyers and sellers. Government should be neither the laggard nor the leader in wages and benefits but the real test is whether you can recruit and retain employees that meet the minimum qualifications and perform to accepted standards. If you can keep the postions filled and get the work done, you’re paying enough. If people are lining up to work for you in jobs where you have competitors, you’re paying too much. In jobs where government is the only employer, the only determinant of appropriate wages and benefits is whether you can fill the jobs with qualified candidates.

The places where you want the “best” employees are in the elected and appointed managerial ranks, and money is rarely their motivator as long as taking the job isn’t too much of a sacrifice; below that, they just need to know who signs their paycheck and do their jobs. All too many of them think that they and their unions rather than the people’s representatives should determine and effectuate public policy, a notion from which they should be disabused and if they persist they should be dismissed as should any who leak or sabotage. One of my great joys was dismissing union activists for leaking and sabotage; gave me a nice, warm feeling.